Sometimes, the smallest act of kindness can change someone’s entire day.

So, what would you do if a customer thought years of precious memories were gone forever, and you realized there might be a way to bring them back?

Would you just let it go because it’s not your business? Or would you take the time to try to recover them?

In the following story, a retail employee finds herself in this exact predicament and chooses the latter.

Here’s what she did.

Today I Made a Customer Cry

I work in photo finishing, and I was helping a friendly lady who wanted prints off of her phone. She off-handedly mentioned that she recently lost all the photos on her phone, so she was only able to get prints from the last few weeks.

I found it odd that the photos would just disappear, but the phone was still working. She insisted, despite being a “technology illiterate,” that she didn’t accidentally delete them.

She also off-handedly mentioned that she thought her phone had a memory card in it.

This needed further investigation. I fully expected her not to have a micro SD card since many older folk call the SIM card a memory card, but lo and behold, there was one inside.

Luckily, she was able to reformat the micro SD card.

I put the card into one computer, and it didn’t show up at all, so I tried our Windows PC instead. It told me the disk was unformatted, likely corrupted somehow by her cheap off-brand Android.

I didn’t want to get her hopes up, but since Windows was able to see it, I thought there might be a chance. So I took a deep breath, formatted it, and threw it into our recovery software.

I was able to recover 90% of the photos and video on that card.

The lady immediately began to cry.

The lady had been waiting for her prints anyway, so I waved for her to come around to my computer and take a look. She looked at the photos on the screen and literally started bawling.

It was all her most important pics – her grandson’s grad, her dog that had passed a few months ago, family trips… Years’ worth of pics that weren’t backed up anywhere.

In the end, she bought a new Micro SD, and I gave her a DVD of the pics at no charge. After paying, she ran behind the counter and gave me a big hug.

I later found out that she had handwritten my boss a letter and said it was the best customer service she’d ever had.

Today has been a good day.

Wow! What a nice thing to do for the customer.

Let’s see how the folks over at Reddit feel about this story.

Here’s someone who also works in the photo department.

This person loved the story.

According to this person, they always help in situations like this.

As this person points out, she saved the customer a lot of money.

What an awesome gesture! We need more retail employees like this!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.